The Unmanned Convenience Store
"Hmm. There's a knight at the register, too. Did they station a clerk in full combat readiness so they can respond the instant any trouble breaks out?"
Helena seemed to be thinking along the same lines I was. It made a certain sense. Her world hadn't exactly been a bastion of public order either — but even so, it was rare for a tavern keeper or a general-store owner to go around in full plate.
Rare, though not unheard of. People who lived near regions that had been completely swallowed by demons went to bed in heavy armor even at night. Armor offered poor protection against bullets, so most gunslingers preferred light gear, or skipped armor altogether and traveled light. Helena herself was a walking example — just a shirt and hot pants, easy and comfortable.
Even ballistic-treated plate couldn't fully cancel the force of a hit. And if someone came at you with purpose-made armor-piercing rounds instead of an ordinary revolver, shotgun, or rifle, the plate would be punched clean through. Aim for a joint in the armor, or the eye-slit in a helm, and you were finished. If defense wasn't going to work anyway, better to stay mobile and make yourself a harder target. That was the baseline mindset of outlaws, bounty hunters, and just about every other profession besides.
But consecrated armor had never been meant for fighting other humans. It was for fighting the demons that would slip their occupied lands at any moment and try to devour humanity. You never knew when they would come, or when they might start gnawing at the minds of those who held the front line — so you lived in that armor, always.
With that in mind, a knight behind the register made a certain kind of sense, just as Helena had said. You never knew what kind of friction might arise with the residents of this villa. Stationing a knight instead of an ordinary civilian was probably the obvious choice.
And while I was staring at the register in bewilderment, and Helena was saying all that, Yegyeong tilted her head and answered.
"Pardon? A knight? Combat readiness…? Ah — you mean the clerk. Ahaha. A Death Knight is still a knight, I suppose? But this is an unmanned convenience store, you see."
Death Knight. The word wasn't entirely unfamiliar, and yet it felt like something that had no business turning up here. I was thrown. Helena, who had never heard the term in her life, only tipped her head.
"And what is that, exactly?"
"Ah… The convenience store you've just walked into is a franchise run by a necromancer. And as you both know, if an ordinary person were to work here, there could be… somewhat dangerous situations, couldn't there?"
"There could, yes."
As Yegyeong launched into her explanation, Helena answered while shooting me a pointed look. Excuse me — was she calling me the danger? Granted, if this had been back when I still couldn't control my strength, she might have had a point. These days, though, I was devoted to the happiness of cute girls, by cute girls, for cute girls.
…Of course, I did have a sneaking suspicion she was giving me that look because of the statue I'd turned into a pretty girl yesterday. That one did sting a little. But even that had been for the happiness of the person involved, and of the overwhelming majority!
Yegyeong, for her part, stuck to her actual job: injecting us with common sense about this world.
"That's why they run this place as an unmanned convenience store. They seat an undead behind the counter — something that can be restored as often as it gets hurt. And if they just put a zombie there, it couldn't respond flexibly to people who've crossed over from all sorts of worlds, so they seat a Death Knight instead. Ah — a zombie is a familiar made by raising the dead and binding them to a necromancer's will. A Death Knight is what you get when you take the zombies with a strong sense of self and high combat ability and give them armor and weapons."
"Raising the dead… that sounds rather wrong…"
Helena's face crumpled at the explanation, and then she looked back at me. Recalling that she herself had died and come back to life had, it seemed, left her feelings in a tangle.
"Hehe. It did go against the natural order. That's why we crossed over into an entirely new world. The Helena of that other world died — but here, Helena is no different from a newborn."
"That's right. Raising the dead is ethically wrong to begin with, and wrong in any number of other ways besides. That's why necromancy is under strict regulation. You have to earn a license, and you have to go to a government office and produce certificates proving you've entered into a fair contract with each familiar. There have to be termination clauses so the dead can go back to sleep whenever they wish, and it has to be stipulated in writing that they may refuse any order that's inhumane or against the law. It's complicated enough that some necromancers just collect chicken and fish bones and stitch together rag golems instead."
Put like that, it didn't sound like a wicked necromancer so much as a profession that briefly raised people who had died unjustly and helped them live out the rest of a life. And if they wanted to rest, they could go back to the grave. People who actually wanted to die were rare, after all. From an undead's point of view, you might not feel loyalty toward the necromancer who had brought you back — but you'd probably grant most of their requests. If the necromancer didn't stay alive, neither did you.
The paperwork was enough to make me a little weary of the whole subject — and then the last part snagged my interest completely.
"Oh, a chicken-bone golem. So when you're eating meat, a necromancer could debone it for you?"
"Yes. There are actually quite a few necromancers who've gone into the deboning trade in Majang-dong."
"Wow."
I'd been hearing about monsters crossing over from other worlds, about people who'd awakened to power, about Returnees who'd come back from other dimensions, about Naturalized Immigrants joining forces with them — and I'd assumed it was all about fighting. So they could use their abilities like this, too.
Then what could our Helena do? She was an excellent shot, so, hmm. Setting combat aside… going to an amusement park and winning prizes at clay pigeon shooting?
I should stop thinking about this.
Anyway. That was how this place had become an unmanned store. A Death Knight wasn't a person, so the description was technically accurate. And since they could fight, you could round it up and call them warriors, too.
The Death Knight at the convenience store had been accounted for. Now it was time to move toward our original purpose. Lunch boxes and drinks, if you please! Naturalized Immigrants heading out for training needed to fill their stomachs!
Ah — I wondered if they'd buy us drinks separately.
"The meal stipend for all of you came through quite generously, so please just pick whichever lunch boxes look good. Some of the bigger eaters take two at a time, and the truly ravenous even add frozen food and cup ramen on top of that. If you're hungry, you're more than welcome to do the same."
As if to tell us not to feel any burden, Yegyeong laid out a comfortably high ceiling in that light, easy way of hers. It wasn't a breezy choose whatever you like so much as a strangely specific upper limit, which made me wonder whether someone in the past had gotten greedy enough to clean the store out.
Fortunately, neither Helena nor I was anywhere near being a big eater.
"Mm. I don't eat that much, myself."
"A taste is enough for me, too. This body of mine doesn't particularly need nutrients. But taking one bite and throwing the rest away would be unfair to the people who made the lunch boxes — and to the lives that went into them, wouldn't it?"
In other words, we could each choose one lunch box, plus a drink. The trouble was that a lot of the lunch boxes on display looked deeply unhinged, which made snatching one up on the spot a little fraught.
Grandma's Bone Hangover Soup Lunch Box. Wait — that was stretching the definition of "lunch box," wasn't it? You could eat that as-is? Three minutes in the microwave and it was done cooking? How? Why?
Elven-Style Beef Bulgogi Set Meal. Elves liked beef bulgogi so much they'd gone and started making it themselves? How had they even gotten into that?
Hamshik's Four-Legged Chicken Lunch Box. Wasn't that hamster the mascot of a fried-chicken place? Why was it on a lunch box too?
Spicy Pork Cutlet Rice Bowl. No — why would you mix those two? Sure, people said that tasty plus tasty equaled tastier, but this was a crime.
Wyvern Whole-Sirloin Cutlet. Hmm. All right. This one actually looked relatively normal.
Helena, who had been scanning the lunch boxes with the help of a translation artifact, suddenly turned a grave face on Yegyeong.
"Grandma's bone hangover soup. Is this food made from the bones of a dead human?"
Yegyeong and I both went blank at the question for a long moment. The residents around us, still half-asleep and picking out their breakfasts, went wide-eyed — and then, watching Yegyeong start to laugh, they muffled their own laughter to match.
"Pardon? Ah — ahahaha! It just means hangover soup the way a grandma would make it. Oh my, I suppose it could look like that."
"Ah… that was rather chilling just now. I thought this was a world where cannibalism had become ordinary."
"A-ah, cannibalism is strictly forbidden in our world. Even vampires drink blood they receive from blood donation centers."
"I see. Hmm. Then I'll take this one. Food made by an aged artisan never fails."
Helena looked so sheepish after the misunderstanding that I felt a little sorry for her. I deliberately picked up a Hamshik's Four-Legged Chicken lunch box and held it out to her.
"What do you think of this hamster? Isn't it cute? It's the same brand as the chicken that statue was eating so happily yesterday. Shall we get this and share it?"
A pure-white hamster with its tongue lolling out on the logo. What a hamster had to do with fried chicken, I had no idea — but the chicken had been delicious, so I wanted Helena to try it too.
Helena accepted the lunch box gently, then frowned again and lowered her voice.
"Yeonmin. The color of your tentacles…"
"Ah. Right. So you saw it."
My arms were bound, so I'd absentmindedly reached out with my thought-form. Maybe it was because I'd put some effort last night into giving that thought-form a shape. I'd unconsciously dressed it in gold, like Helena's glittering will — and she'd seen it.
If Helena had seen it, that meant Yegyeong could have seen it too. What if they caught me using my power even while I was wearing restraints? Of course, I'd probably already been found out the moment I turned that statue into a pretty girl. They hadn't pressed the issue any further, so maybe they weren't treating it as a serious problem. Hmm. I wasn't sure.
Fortunately, Yegyeong seemed not to have noticed me lifting the lunch box with my thought-form; she'd been busy choosing her own. I was just starting to feel relieved when Helena looked at me with a face on the verge of tears, squeezed her eyes shut, and turned her head away.
Hmm. Had copying her color moved her that much? It was possible she hated it — but if Helena ran into something she hated, she'd get angry before she cried. Hehe. So there had been a point to agonizing over the color. It was still faint, like a dusting of powder, nothing like the vivid golden trails Helena left when she fired a bullet — which might also have been why Yegyeong hadn't seen it.
All right. Then breakfast was hangover bone soup and chicken. There was no way this wouldn't be delicious.